Sid Luckman helped attract standing-room-only crowds to Wrigley Field during 1940-46, when he quarterbacked the Bears to four National Football League championships.
He drew one final SRO crowd Wednesday at his funeral service on the North Side. Luckman, the greatest quarterback in Bears history, died Sunday in North Miami Beach, Fla., at 81.
Wednesday’s congregation cut across lines of religion, race, generation and economics. It included fans from the grandstand as well as the people who operate teams, such as Virginia and Ed McCaskey of the Bears and Jerry Reinsdorf of the White Sox and Bulls.
The congregation heard Rabbi Jonathan Magidovitch eulogize Luckman as a generous trailblazer and a religious man who made other people feel good about themselves.
Magidovitch told of a time when a beggar in the street approached a car containing Luckman and family members. Luckman not only gave money to the beggar “but began talking to him until the beggar stopped being a beggar,” the rabbi recalled. “They were just two human beings talking to one another.
“Sid Luckman was a famous guy, but when you met him, he made you feel famous. You people in the congregation, if he made you feel better about yourself, raise your hand. Let the family see this.”
Scores of hands rose immediately. Then more, until the number was in the hundreds. The hands belonged to former teammates and coaches, business associates, lodge members, grandparents, young people and Bears fans.
“Keep him alive,” Magidovitch said. “Talk about him.”
A portrait of Luckman in a business suit stood at one end of the casket. At the other end was an American flag, representing his World War II service in the merchant marine and a statuette that resembled the Heisman Trophy, except that the player had his arm cocked to throw a football, not a stiff-arm.
Luckman’s daughter, Gail Weiss, spoke of the particularly poignant epitaph he had chosen for himself. “How many people can say, `I’ve seen it all. Done it all. Loved it all’? Those are my father’s words–words he wants on his stone. They comfort me.”
Magidovitch talked of Luckman’s role as a Jewish football player in the 1930s and ’40s.
“At the time Sid Luckman played for the Bears,” he said, “Jews in Europe were regularly murdered, regardless of their humanity or talent. Sid Luckman was the embodiment of judging people for what they do. He carried the hopes of a generation. . . . He accepted that.
“Sid Luckman was religious. When he spoke in synagogue, it was about sport and teamwork. He also believed in turning the other cheek and not judging others. He wanted to rid the word of disease, war, poverty.”
He was best known as a football player, but he was so much more.
